On 13 December 1972, Zambia’s founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, signed into law the Constitution (Amendment) Acts, numbers 3,4 and 5 ending the country’s First Republic and ushering in a new constitution for the country, which promised a “One-Party Participatory Democracy” under “one and only one party…., namely, the United National Independence Party (UNIP).”

On the evening of 5 April 2012, the prime-time bulletin on the television news of the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), announced to the country that the president, Ngwazi Professor Bingu wa Mutharika, “had been taken ill and had been flown to South Africa for specialist treatment.”

​2025 has not been easy on Nigerians. The economy has looked far from bright; the weather has been suffocating; and cost of living has been stubbornly oppressive. With rising massacres in the Middle Belt, and Borno State in the north-east apparently losing ground to the nihilism of Boko Haram terror, violence remains unremitting. In the […]

​As he settled in to deliver the judgment of the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal on 2 April 2025, presiding judge, Wilfred Kpochi, felt obliged to get one ritual out of the way. Glancing left and right, he asked each of his two colleagues on the three-person tribunal to confirm that the judgment he […]

​Numan, the town that lends its name to one of the 21 Local Government Areas in Adamawa State in north-east Nigeria, is home to the Bwatiye (Bachama), a transnational identity group stretching into parts of Cameroon. Located in the basin of Benue River and one of its tributaries, River Taraba, Numan’s fecundlands play host to […]

In the week in which former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai abandoned the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, to chart a different political trajectory with the Social Democratic Party, SDP, his son, Bashir, characteristically made it known that “Southern Kaduna residents will keep seeing sheghe if they continue to attack indigenous Fulani herdsmen.”  Three things about […]

​At the end of February 2025, Nigeria’s Supreme Court continued a tradition of afflicting the people of the territory of Rivers State with curious jurisprudence.

Comprising five of the country’s 36 states, south-east Nigeria is the site of resilient atrocity. In the eight years from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2023, the monitoring coalition, Nigeria Mourns, confirmed about 3,000 killings in this theatre from open source records but unofficial estimates suggest that there may be up to […]

…This column this week publishes their rejoinders (modestly edited for economy) without comment.  ____________________________________ My Father Refused to Swear in Muhammadu Buhari after the Coup of 31 December 1983 By Seyi Sowemimo, SAN I have in recent times come across two posts or write-ups put up by Professor Odinkalu containing some misinformation, which requires correction […]

In January 1983, a suspicious fire incident did considerable damage to NECOM House, the high-rise building in Lagos that housed the headquarters of the country’s telecommunications monopoly, then known as the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited, NITEL. Alhaji Shehu Shagari was in power as elected civilian president.